


Polymorph

by wisdomeagle



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Character Death Fix, F/F, Magic, Science, Threesome - F/F/F, Venn Diagram, Wicca
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-03-14
Updated: 2005-03-14
Packaged: 2018-04-17 20:58:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4681241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wisdomeagle/pseuds/wisdomeagle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three ways of knowing, two conversations, and one new thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Polymorph

**Author's Note:**

  * For [justmalea (mal_badinthelatin)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mal_badinthelatin/gifts).



> For a Buffyverse Femslash ficathon on LiveJournal

Fred catalogues them in analogues, as antonyms, as like and unlike terms. She arranges them vertically, makes a Venn diagram, and in the overlapping center she writes the word "GIRLS" then crosses it out and replaces it with "WOMEN" and a thoughtful "?" as punctuation. In the circle where she and Willow overlap she writes the words "we have been with men" and draws crude stick figures of their respective men. She writes tiny fractions and derivatives in her and Willow's part of the circle, and decorates it with arc tangents and hamburgers, since in the Tara-alone circle, she's written the word "vegan" in her best script. Tara's circle is filled with lavender colored pencil and soft script and words like "sapphic" and "soft" and "innocent." At first she'd written "innocent" by Willow's name as well, but that night, Willow had scratched and bit and, her shoulder still throbbing and bruised, Fred has erased the word, leaving a purplish smear between Willow and Tara, along with "magic" and "loved each other first." She tries to draw magic, but there aren't enough shades of purple and gray in her set of colored pencils, not enough greeny blues to convey the way they sit and swirl elements around them, the way they summon the forces of nature.

The intersection between her and Tara is more difficult to analyze, and at night she peers at Tara as if through a microscope, examining her pores and the underside of her skin, watching blood pump through her veins, watching magic slide off the ends of her fingertips as they descend into Willow. She tries to catalogue the tastes on the inside of Tara's lips, the back of her tongue, but she gets lost in the lush tang, forgets the periodic table and is left with only a vague sensation of richness. She cannot compare it to anything.

She finds that she has filled the Tara and Fred space with aquamarine bubbles for the fish that they are taking care of together, with dashed lines for the crossword puzzle book Tara gave her for their three-month anniversary, with red heart symbols that mean we are both in love with Willow.

On her computer she makes a spreadsheet of their time together, a database of their love, prints it out on a transparency and overlays the spreadsheet and the Venn diagram and stares at them for a long time. She staples the pages together and signs her name with a blue transparency marker. "Winifred Burkle," signed with a flourish and a smudge of blue.

"What's that?" asks Willow.

"Oh, nothing," says Fred. "Don't mind me."

Willow sees them best in her blindness. She closes her eyes to do a spell and feels magic flowing all around her, steady streams of it from Tara, fits and starts from Fred. She draws their magic and her magic together, braiding the three strands of power into a tight cord, which she wraps like a noose around her neck. She wears them like a scarf, and sometimes, she checks herself in the mirror, to make sure that she matches, and then she sees she's not wearing anything around her neck, not a Star of David, not a pentagram, certainly not Fred and Tara, sparks and colors and powers flitting around her. She pulls her hair away from her face and looks at herself, but she still sees better with her eyes closed.

Willow's eyes slide shut when she edges her tongue over the border between Tara's thighs and into her depths, and in the darkness she can smell and taste _Tara_ , rich flavors mingling with bitters. She sees with her tongue, with her fingers, that Tara surrenders to her, thrusts up to greet her tongue, to reply to her Will You Be Mine? with an answering always. When her eyes open, Tara looks at her in disbelief, Tara reprimands her with her eyes, with the way she holds herself. Tara curls up as far away from her as she can get, will kiss Fred when Willow knows Tara knows Willow is watching. She tries to understand but there's too much complexity, and it burns her eyes.

Eyes-open Fred is equally confusing; she makes charts that Willow will never be able to collate, taking data points, clicking her pencil against her clipboard, hurrying off to work in her short skirt, smiling quickly when Willow says, "You look sexy," but not bothering to give her a goodbye kiss. Willow ponders each little pain in her heart. But when their eyes close and their noses bump and their lips grind against each other, when their mouths open into each other, then Willow only knows that Fred is hers, that Fred loves her, wants her. When she closes her eyes she can sometimes hear Fred explaining that Angel's newest client wants them to watch over a certain place, and when she talks -- babbles -- Willow can hear her catch her breath, can hear her heart beating a little slower or faster, can feel the cadences of her speech slow when she's ready for the rest of them to chime in with suggestions. Understanding Fred means listening to the in-betweens.

Sometimes, all that's in between is emptiness, and then Fred talks too fast, and Willow can't catch her own breath. But this is not one of those times. Whatever's in Fred's silences, it's not for lack of trying that Willow can't hear it. She closes her eyes and it is close, close in a heartbeat, the words chiming inside out.

Tara is easier to understand, always; Willow knows her like her own soul, and doesn't have to listen to hear too many words, too many spells, because when they chant and pray together they know the Goddess and know each other and there is nothing else that needs to be known in the space between; there are only the two of them. She knows the grain of Tara's hair that drips down her back and she knows the flush of Tara's thigh and the dry spot on Tara's back and the pool where sweat gathers and the place in her mouth where their saliva mingles. She knows the fluid way of Tara's movements and the shyness of Tara's insides.

She knows that Tara loves her but doesn't understand why Tara looks at her fearfully and says her name. Even with her eyes closed, she cannot see, so she asks, "Are you all right?" but Tara only ever answers, "Fine, baby."

Tara loved girls first and so knows about their mysteries. There are some tricks you only learn when you spend all of high school watching one particular ballerina at the barre every morning out of the corner of your eye when you were walking to your locker, and Tara knows all these tricks and many more. She knows how to hide behind her long hair while she's getting ready to go to the gallery where she works, knows how to zip up tan slacks and keep her legs inside them, safe from view. She knows what it means when Fred scrunches her nose and when Willow shakes her head in anger.

Tara loves the Goddess, too, and this has taught her something about mystery solving that Fred, two years now at a supernatural detective agency, will never know because she has never read a book that circled in on itself, never contemplated a few words carved into a statuette of St. Bridget for hours, trying to learn their inner meaning, the one that isn't known except to devotees.

Tara is a devotee of many Goddesses, and a pilgrim to many foreign lands. She has been to heaven, she believes, and more than that she has been to Los Angeles, city of the angels, and she is the only one of the three who believes in real angels, in messengers from heaven. Fred once expressed belief in a sort of white-winged monstrous thing she claimed was an angel, but Tara knows better, and only partially because she has seen heaven.

There is a newness to them that she resisted at first but that now feels right, since she has dug a little deeper. When she came back to Willow, she started by kissing her forehead so that Willow would know she was real, but Willow didn't understand this until they came to see Fred and Fred looked her over, up and down, with a Geiger counter and said, "Yep, she's from another dimension, all right."

Fred doesn't know what the word heaven means, and Tara knows of only one way to show her, with fingers parting her lips and one on her clitoris, telling her, yes, now, darling, for me.

Tara finds Fred's apartment to be frightening usually, but today it is full of cat hair. Fred brushes her hair away from her eyes. "We had a little incident with a cat and a dog-demon."

"A cat and dog demon?"

"No, the cat was normal, or as normal as cats get."

"We had a cat once," Tara tells her.

Fred nods. "I like fish better though. They don't get hair in your computer the way this beastie did. Lucky I didn't lose any data. Say, do you know when Willow will be home?"

"No, she didn't say. Why?"

"I've got something to show you."

Tara looks at Fred's chart for a long time and for the first time she realizes that she can't figure them all out. She thought she knew them from the outside in, that she knew the glowing red core of Fred's heart, the brilliant blue power of Willow's soul, but she doesn't know a thing, not if she doesn't know how to make their circles overlap entirely, not if she can't understand Fred's chart.

"I didn't show Willow."

"Because she wouldn't understand?"

"Because she would."

Tara realizes there's something that's electric and that flashes blue and white, the tiny half-bitten apple on Fred's mousepad that doesn't mean Eden, not temptation and fall nor the newer meaning to the old legend. This is neither grace nor sin but information, strings of bits, totally unlike the old power that Tara knows.

Neither better nor worse for being newer, but it is one more thing about resurrection that she doesn't understand.

This reminds Fred of something and she gets her favorite purple magic marker and writes in bold letters that both she and Tara were once "in another dimension."

"Sometimes I feel like I'm underwater," she says, "like I'm swimming to the surface but there's so much garbage underneath, like there was an oil spill and the ocean's all slick and I'm stuck inside it."

Tara just looks at her, like Willow never does, because Willow is afraid that when she looks too closely, she won't see them anymore. Fred's not afraid, though, and neither is Tara, and they look at each other and see that they are both beloved, which means more than just that they are both in love.

When Willow comes home she can hear her girlfriends making love, and she is attuned to every gasp and can feel every flush and every swish and every taste of skin on skin, and she hurries to go upstairs, because her girls are waiting for her, and she is thirsty, hungry.

Tara will give her pure water to drink and Fred will feed her from the richness of the tree of knowledge, and together they will form a circle that will not, cannot, break, because one is mortal and two are finite but three is the number of the trinity, maiden mother crone, and Willow thinks the three of them will never die, because they are infinite.

**Author's Note:**

> Justmalea requested a surprise pairing, but said, "i guess people would get extra special coolness points if they made me a willow/tara/fred or a willow/tara/anya... :) that would totally be the coolest..." 
> 
> She also wanted:  
> Three other requests for your fic: post Chosen, canon characterizations, and some kind of plot... :)  
> Three things you do NOT want included: no character bashing, i have no idea what schmoop is, so none of that, and nothing too angsty unless you are going to make it reallllly long... :)  
> Rating preference (a range is helpful here): at least PG-13, the higher the better though... :)


End file.
